Microtransactions Aren’t So Micro These Days

Diablo IV is trying to trick me with cute kittens

My current character stands with her free dog pet in Diablo IV. Screenshot taken by the author.

It all started with that stupid-looking horse armor. Back on the Xbox 360 in 2006, long before any of today’s live service subscription-driven monetized games were even a single spark inside an executive’s brain, Bethesda rolled out a little two dollar item bundle on the internet. It sold so well that it changed the gaming industry forever, turning every game into a potential endless source of revenue.

Yay?

For that couple of bucks you got some mostly worthless sets of armor to strap to your horse in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Making some horse armor cost a lot less than making “real” content, so the profit margin was higher than anything any other game could produce. The whole industry stood up and listened, and it was changed overnight. It had been working so hard to make so much high quality content, but now the customers had opened their wallets for the cheapest possible thing with just as much enthusiasm. Why spend a year or two making a proper full-price expansion with an entire team when one artist and one designer can crank out cosmetic items hundreds of times faster?

This type of design now permeates the entire industry to the tune of billions of additional dollars in revenue, and the prices for…